T.H. Tsien

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Alternative Title:
Tsien Tsuen-hsuin

T.H. Tsien, (Tsien Tsuen-hsuin), Chinese-born scholar (born Dec. 1, 1909, Taizhou, Jiangsu province, China—died April 9, 2015, Chicago, Ill.), was renowned as an expert in Chinese bibliography and paleography. In 1941 he rescued some 30,000 ancient Chinese texts during the Japanese occupation of China, and later he developed an extraordinary East Asian library at the University of Chicago. Tsien participated in the Chinese Nationalist army’s 1926–27 Northern Expedition, a campaign against warlords who dominated much of the country, before attending what is now Nanjing University, from which he graduated (1932) with a degree in history and library science. He worked at the Nanjing branch of China’s national library until he was forced to flee with his extended family just ahead of the Nanjing Massacre; he relocated to Shanghai, where he continued to work at the national library. It was in this capacity that he became responsible for smuggling the ancient volumes to the U.S. Library of Congress, which had agreed to safeguard the historical trove to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Japanese occupiers. He labeled crates of the volumes as new books and delivered them with the help of a friend who worked in the customs service. Tsien was sent to the U.S. in 1947 to retrieve the books, but the outbreak of civil war in China prevented his return. He then accepted a position cataloguing the Chinese holdings of the University of Chicago. He earned (1957) a Ph.D. in library science and East Asian studies there and became a professor of East Asian languages and civilizations and curator of the university’s East Asian library. He wrote a number of books, including A History of Writing and Writing Materials in Ancient China (1975) and Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions (1962; rev. ed. 2004).